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" Plus: Listen to the full Esquire Valentine&amp;#039;s Day Playlist on Spotify Last week&amp;#039;s playlist featured Blake Mills covering one of the most agonizing, heartbreaking Valentines ever, Bobby Charles&amp;#039; &amp;quot;I Hope.&amp;quot; That got us thinking: a Valentine&amp;#039;s Day playlist of the best breakup songs? A Valentine&amp;#039;s playlist of songs about loneliness? Counter-programming Valentine&amp;#039;s Day seemed too cynical and maybe too easy. Because the hardest thing to do in the playlist-making business is a Valentine&amp;#039;s list \u2014 love songs are just too personal, too open to be interpreted by your own experiences for any one list to be remotely alternative or definitive. So let&amp;#039;s do this anyway: How about we consider this a 30-song addendum to last year&amp;#039;s Valentine&amp;#039;s playlist? For that list, we used two criteria: A) No super-obvious songs. No &amp;quot;&amp;#039;Crazy.&amp;quot; No &amp;quot;My Girl.&amp;quot; No &amp;quot;Killing Me Softly with His Song.&amp;quot; B) Selections should be direct, useful, and, in most cases, feature at least one line of universal, or conversely, completely unique, sentiment \u2014 a lyric Hallmark has yet to mine but you secretly wish they did. Or they&amp;#039;re just irreverent. This year, we&amp;#039;ll add two more: C) If they&amp;#039;re from a major artist, they&amp;#039;re not the most obvious love song from their catalogue. D) Some of the great love songs are about the one that got away. The list should acknowledge that. Here are those songs and the lyrics that make them significant... \u2028 Billy Bragg/Wilco, &amp;quot;California Stars&amp;quot;      Because when you&amp;#039;re talking about the direct delivery of universal sentiment, this Woody Guthrie poem is the yardstick all other songs on this list should be judged by. Line for line, it ranks up there with the greatest Valentine of all time, Willie Nelson&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Crazy.&amp;quot; Beck, &amp;quot;Love&amp;quot;      Because Beck&amp;#039;s desperate warble on this John Lennon cover underscores the lesson we all come around to eventually: You have to buy a ticket to win. &amp;quot;Love is wanting to be loved.&amp;quot; Jake Bugg, &amp;quot;A Song About Love&amp;quot;      Because while Bugg knows that sometimes a love song isn&amp;#039;t enough, this is a song about love anyway \u2014 lost love, distant love, and an endless quest to get it back on track. Flaming Lips, &amp;quot;Do You Realize?&amp;quot;      Because in Wayne Coyne&amp;#039;s world, if you scratch the surface of every existential crisis, you&amp;#039;ll find a love song. Willie Nelson, &amp;quot;Valentine&amp;quot;      Because this is the most underrated Willie Nelson love song of all time. &amp;quot;Candy heart/If anyone could you could have a candy heart/You&amp;#039;re the sweetest of all sweethearts/Won&amp;#039;t you give your heart to me?&amp;quot; Ike &amp;amp;amp; Tina Turner, &amp;quot;Something&amp;quot;      Because Sinatra knew love songs and called this Beatles classic the best love song in the last 50 years. But there&amp;#039;s something about a woman singing it \u2014 the mystery of love works in both directions \u2014 that makes it more powerful. Prince, &amp;quot;U Got the Look&amp;quot;      More of Andy Langer&amp;#039;s Songs of the Week &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a27301/valentines-day-playlist/>